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Nobody likes malware. Correction: nobody with a soul likes malware, which effectively excludes malware writers and script kiddies who find it monetarily beneficial (the former) or just plain amusing (the latter) to spread infected files. Microsoft certainly isn't amused by malware and has built a tool to help restore systems ravaged by rootkits and other cruft.
Windows Defender Offline Beta is a new security tool Microsoft has made available to help remove hard to find malicious software and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), such as rootkits and advanced malware that might slip past anti-malware programs.
Microsoft's free beta security tool initially is a small download that creates a bootable CD, DVD, or USB flash drive. You will, however, need 250MB of free space for the program on your optical or USB media to store the program and definition files, and an Internet connection to download said files.
You can check out the related FAQ here and download the beta software (32-bit and 64-bit versions available) here.
Comments are closed on this article
iwolbers
December 13, 2011 at 3:25pm
Cool. I figured I would give it a go and see if it picked up anything however I am using Truecrypt. Any ideas on how to not un-encrypt my entire HD and still be able to use this tool or are Truecrypt users SOL?
jaypers
December 13, 2011 at 1:06pm
with some of the malware i've had to remove, having a boot disk would be nice. would save me from having to completely reinstall windows.
spazimspaz
December 13, 2011 at 11:11am
Boot disc seriously guys? The last os that had an official boot disc was 98... Vista and 7 have start up repair and XP has the recovery console... Boot disc have gone the way of the dinosaur...
Caboose
December 14, 2011 at 10:21am
Lik OMG rite?! No one should EVER need to use a BootDisc, lik EVER!
Are you serious? Any tech worth his silicon has a BootDisc of sorts in his or her toolbox. BootDiscs allow you to service areas of the PC that you can't really access, or access easily from within an OS. Also these areas that need to be serviced can't be done properly, or at all, while the OS is running.
Besides, when trying to clean a nasty virus off a PC, I'd rather do it in an environment outside of the local OS. Files will be unlocked, viruses will be inactive, etc, making removal easy.
But hey, if you want to do things the hard way, be my guest.
AETAaAS
December 13, 2011 at 10:19am
Boot discs are part of every geek's toolkit and it's nice to see Microsoft putting more attention towards these more robust methods of stomping out malware. Would be nice if MaxPC did a comparison between the various boot discs (eg. Bit Defender, AVG, Windows Defender, etc.)
themohawkadmin
December 13, 2011 at 10:38am
I second that. It would be interesting to see how boot discs compare to stand-alone antivirus software (like malwarebytes) in safe mode.
